fiction
"Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine"
-Guillaume Apollinaire
New Bridge. Four-thirty. Birds wheeling in clumsy formations around bell-shaped clouds. One of my feet is bare, and I can feel the tar on the planks sticking to its sole. The other has a sneaker on. Sock balled up in my hand, second sneaker a smelly pendant around my neck, I stop walking and turn outward. The Hackensack River plods on beneath me. A beer can bobs, ducks, and recedes. The banks are scrubby with half-dead horsetail, and a smell of rotting groundhog is heavy on the wind. It's ugly but it feels like home.
If I were to keep on walking, I'd cross the bridge and see a big expanse of soggy low-tide marshland, and a little cement platform below an arch of thorns. I would recall more strongly the years I sat and watched the turtles mate and the red factory across the river steam and thunder-and, even more strongly, I'd recall the year I shared joints with a doughy, doughty boy, our legs dangling inches above the water. But for now I'm okay with resting my elbows on the cold rail and watching the debris race by, letting the air ripen in my nose.
It's getting colder, though, the wind skimming and scything and pricking my bare toes. I narrow my eyes: though I haven't yet crossed the bridge, I can nearly see the boy I recall so fondly, marijuana smelling up his jeans, hair a-shiver in the wind, and myself, seventeen, barefoot, hanging on his soft arm and sighing for the kind and violet-colored world. The music sounded sweet and the sky sealed us off from danger. It fit neatly over the trees like a lid. Through the slats of the bridge, I can nearly see that first moment of milky and fearless nakedness shining through years and the murky skin on the river and the sulks and recriminations that came after-- the holistic moment of impact, fingers on back and soul on soul. There were stifling afternoons to follow, and life in a bad, slack, ransacked body, but those were instants of true and shining self-habitation. Effulgent, indulgent, and long done.
I can still recall the notions of seventeen-how we stewed up a future for ourselves, him a sturdy pillar for all citizens, me a holy mess in moth-eaten clothing, and making maelstroms at night...and in the morning, how-convenient, all that joy would still be there, bound up in one adorable indent in the sheet. How we'd rise in heady spirals, going up like stairs, each assured the other would remain the perfect newel.
A dozen feet below me the Hackensack trips mutely along, and the distant buildings keep it hemmed in and complacent. The dreamed staircase of seventeen no longer coils, tight and neat, as crisply in my mind. It's blurred by the names of a few dozen men and boys now-sweetness gone rotten, and dreams stuck shut. Planting my sticky feet, I watch a green bottle rise and sink, and imagine old dreams circling on its trembling lip-doe-eyed, nebulous things, chasing themselves, unaware they are chasing themselves. They don't yet know that theirs is a closed circuit, they can't hear the nails hammering inexorably home all around them. They chitter and fly, deaf to finality, racing around the rim til the bottle reaches the sea.
A dark plate of color descends on the sky, and the sun snaps out of sight behind a sudden cloud bank. The wind whips the horsetail; I unclench my fingers round my sock, spread it reluctantly, case up my foot. It is time to walk past the streetlamp and the bashed-in storefront by the old parking space and the green patch for the geese. Past the inn and the intersection. The future pallid, uncalamitous, a thousand dull and plausible moments arranging themselves before me in the air. I crunch over the ground, shod firmly, up the road and home.
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine"
-Guillaume Apollinaire
New Bridge. Four-thirty. Birds wheeling in clumsy formations around bell-shaped clouds. One of my feet is bare, and I can feel the tar on the planks sticking to its sole. The other has a sneaker on. Sock balled up in my hand, second sneaker a smelly pendant around my neck, I stop walking and turn outward. The Hackensack River plods on beneath me. A beer can bobs, ducks, and recedes. The banks are scrubby with half-dead horsetail, and a smell of rotting groundhog is heavy on the wind. It's ugly but it feels like home.
If I were to keep on walking, I'd cross the bridge and see a big expanse of soggy low-tide marshland, and a little cement platform below an arch of thorns. I would recall more strongly the years I sat and watched the turtles mate and the red factory across the river steam and thunder-and, even more strongly, I'd recall the year I shared joints with a doughy, doughty boy, our legs dangling inches above the water. But for now I'm okay with resting my elbows on the cold rail and watching the debris race by, letting the air ripen in my nose.
It's getting colder, though, the wind skimming and scything and pricking my bare toes. I narrow my eyes: though I haven't yet crossed the bridge, I can nearly see the boy I recall so fondly, marijuana smelling up his jeans, hair a-shiver in the wind, and myself, seventeen, barefoot, hanging on his soft arm and sighing for the kind and violet-colored world. The music sounded sweet and the sky sealed us off from danger. It fit neatly over the trees like a lid. Through the slats of the bridge, I can nearly see that first moment of milky and fearless nakedness shining through years and the murky skin on the river and the sulks and recriminations that came after-- the holistic moment of impact, fingers on back and soul on soul. There were stifling afternoons to follow, and life in a bad, slack, ransacked body, but those were instants of true and shining self-habitation. Effulgent, indulgent, and long done.
I can still recall the notions of seventeen-how we stewed up a future for ourselves, him a sturdy pillar for all citizens, me a holy mess in moth-eaten clothing, and making maelstroms at night...and in the morning, how-convenient, all that joy would still be there, bound up in one adorable indent in the sheet. How we'd rise in heady spirals, going up like stairs, each assured the other would remain the perfect newel.
A dozen feet below me the Hackensack trips mutely along, and the distant buildings keep it hemmed in and complacent. The dreamed staircase of seventeen no longer coils, tight and neat, as crisply in my mind. It's blurred by the names of a few dozen men and boys now-sweetness gone rotten, and dreams stuck shut. Planting my sticky feet, I watch a green bottle rise and sink, and imagine old dreams circling on its trembling lip-doe-eyed, nebulous things, chasing themselves, unaware they are chasing themselves. They don't yet know that theirs is a closed circuit, they can't hear the nails hammering inexorably home all around them. They chitter and fly, deaf to finality, racing around the rim til the bottle reaches the sea.
A dark plate of color descends on the sky, and the sun snaps out of sight behind a sudden cloud bank. The wind whips the horsetail; I unclench my fingers round my sock, spread it reluctantly, case up my foot. It is time to walk past the streetlamp and the bashed-in storefront by the old parking space and the green patch for the geese. Past the inn and the intersection. The future pallid, uncalamitous, a thousand dull and plausible moments arranging themselves before me in the air. I crunch over the ground, shod firmly, up the road and home.